Large difference between saying they will, and article speculates they might with absolutely no confirmation from Intel or Apple. Big, big difference.
As for the cores, we've yet to see anything concrete. Intel has touted all the same improvements for previous architectures. Sunny Cove is not a 'new' architecture, it's just Icelake's internal microarchitecture name, the difference between Zen 1 and a Ryzen 1800x. It's not expected to see a new ground up architecture till sometime into 2021 and beyond so we'll see what they bring with it. I'm expecting the same edge case scenarios where Icelake performs better but in most applications a small real world IPC bump, we'll also have to see what actual clock speeds they launch with as everything so far has Intel saying 10nm is going to be slower than well, 14nm+ let alone whatever number of +'s they have now.
it would seem that Icelake will get a small bump in IPC but probably a loss in clock speeds, it depends how big both are to see if it's even faster both stock and overclocked than the current chips. gain 5% IPC and lose 10% clocks won't be good, gain 10% ipc and lose 5% clocks, better but still not a big boost. Outside of some edge case scenarios and also primarily in synthetic workloads (cough AVX512) I doubt we'll see a major IPC improvement from Intel in at least another couple of years.
